Ekk Deewana Tha - Review

In the spirit of full disclosure, the 8.30 AM show I was booked for was cancelled due to a technical glitch. The 11 AM show that I rebooked myself for, started at 11.50. So bear in mind that I had a mighty, almost 4-hour long frustration pent up.

Even so, finally when the trailers before the show began, I dutifully reminded myself. "It's not the makers' fault. It's not Prateik Babbar's fault that he can't act the show didn't start on time." As the film reels on, I tell myself, "Oh don't be so harsh even though you can do better make-up with your recently acquired knowledge about lip shades and sundry. This is a regional film trying to reach out to a wider audience. Accept those sensibilities." And stop talking to yourself. With that reprimand in about the 15th minute of the film, I promise to give the film a fair chance.

But Ek Deewana Tha didn't want it.

I was allowing myself to acknowledge that problems with inter-religion marriages persist and are not bygones of the 80s and 90s, even if we claim to have embraced the 21st century; that there is something very sweet and innocent about 'love at first sight' even if it is by a character you couldn't care for. I'm not going to be judgmental about what a good-for-nothing he is. I appreciate that having been fed on characters that are white or black, it's natural for me to get annoyed by a lead lady who is thoroughly confused about her priorities in life. It does happen in real life, doesn't it?

And then, I gave up.

Groping for slivers of hope isn't good enough. The actors have to look and feel real. Awful dialogue delivery + awful dubbing + awful make-up = total exasperation. In addition, this romantic film grows twists and turns, one would tire of, even in a thriller. More on that later. First, please tell me there is some news byte, somewhere, that talks about how director, Gautham Menon repents the choice of Prateik Babbar and Amy Jackson. I haven't seen any of his Tamil films but I'm told that the Ek Deewana Tha's original is an amazingly touching film.

We could even have blamed Amy Jackson's dubbing for the lack of variation in intonation, but any one fish from Finding Nemo is more expressive than her and Pratiek Babbar put together.

It's a miracle then, that there were a couple of scenes that make you sense a spectacular moment between the two. There was even a misplace but well-done father-son scene between Sachin Khedekar and Prateik BabbarJust when you are beginning to get hopeful about some click between chemistry and biology, you are cut rather rudely into the next scene and land into the next abrupt event in the leads pair's life.

The background music adds to the chops from one scene to another and sometimes dishevels you bang in the middle of a film. That coming from a film touted as a musical by A. R. Rahman and Javed Akhtar. I don't know about them or Gautham Menon or the genius marketing team that came up with that tag-line, but my head hangs in shame.

What could still have been a sweet film in the blast-from-the-plast kind-of a way completely lost it in the last half an hour or so. In its attempt to do something different from the regular love story, we have writers going amok and finally confusing themselves like their lead character about what they want out of this film. The climax is such a cheat that one's you are through with it you realize, the relaxed, build-up of the whole film was with only this purposed in mind, as if all the writing energies were focused only on making the audience guess and double-guess. You realize that the first two hours of the film had nothing really going in them or for them.

I started out, hoping that I wouldn't let the frustration from the delay of the show come in my way of enjoying a romantic film. As I recount the things that went wrong, I wonder if some of you might think that I allowed that to come in my way of being completely disappointed.